In this documentary about her life and the animal rights organization around which it is centered, Ingrid Newkirk, founder of PETA, is first seen sitting in the dark in her austere apartment near Washington DC, reading letters that include both hate and fan mail.

One letter reads, “My father saw [PETA’s exposé on turkey farms] and refused to eat turkey on Thanksgiving.” The next letter reads, “You’re asserting that there is no difference between an animal and a human being.” Newkirk smiles in the face of everything. Bill Maher (a PETA Board member) says early in the film, “PETA—if you said it twenty years ago, people only thought of bread.” From Ingrid’s point of view, his statement testifies to the progress that has been made, since people hearing the acronym today are likely to think of animal advocacy and the organization that she has worked so hard to create.

I Am an Animal, the HBO documentary, has won an award and been shown over twenty times on HBO’s main channels during its brief existence. It is still in rotation on cable. During the documentary, the filmmaker/camera discusses Ingrid’s personal motivations with her, and follows her as she wears multiple hats in her work at PETA.

Throughout the film, Ingrid and her PETA team maintain that publicity of any sort is good publicity. We see Ingrid brainstorming with a handful of her 300 employees at PETA’s headquarters as they discuss their next marketing campaign. With the help of her undercover filming project coordinator, the small group analyzes the feelings of a new hire who is having a hard time wearing his hidden camera, which is being used to film packed cages of 50,000 shackled turkeys from 5:45 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. daily. After he finally agrees to cooperate, Ingrid and others view his undercover tape, which shows another male employee sexually assaulting a turkey. The undercover PETA employee describes the scene on tape, as well: “I saw a turkey get sexually abused before it died today. He stuck his finger in the turkey’s vagina for thirty seconds, which validates every notion I had about slaughterhouses.” Scenes such as these made me, among others in the audience, grimace and turn away in disgust; meanwhile, Ingrid’s commitment and candidness keep the undercover films coming in, in response to her demands. “You’ve got to come down on him like a ton of bricks,” she says to their undercover plant, in reference to getting more footage of the slaughterhouse’s cruelty. Strategies such as these are one of the reasons PETA has succeeded with seventy-five uncover investigations since 1981, and why they are now working with labor unions to change employee conduct in poultry slaughterhouses.

The documentary reveals that the success the organization has achieved in fighting for its cause is a direct result of Ingrid’s passion. Whether she’s driving down the road in her car and pulling over to check on a sick bird roadside, or strategizing with her protest team in the narrow halls of a French hotel about an anti-fur protest against Yves Saint Laurent and Jean Paul Gautier’s boutiques in Paris, Ingrid is everywhere she wants to be. She knows that the only way she will succeed in her mission is to be as outspoken as possible, explaining, “[We’re] desperate to catch people’s attention. [It has to be] an act of desperation or there will be silence and no one will know there’s an animal rights crisis.” While rehearsing the Parisian shops protest with her team members, she exclaims, “[Gautier]’s a real fur pimp, isn’t he?” And when she and others sneak into the Gautier boutique, they come armed with agents from the world press to shoot photos of the whole escapade—as they grab furs, put them on, and then climb into the store window to smear blood all over windows and fur while moaning in French, “Gautier, Assassin!”